From high seas to Felton trees: Cargo containers used to create ultra-modern cabin

ZAYANTE — Suspended from a crane in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Connie DeWitt's kitchen and bathroom are inches from nudging a madrone tree.

The 30-foot shipping container was the largest of six trucked from Oakland up a muddy Zayante road Thursday afternoon. Before dinner, less than eight hours after the containers arrived, workers from NorCal Construction in Santa Cruz had ground the final bits of rust off the boxes and welded them together to create DeWitt's two-story mountain retreat.

"The crane guy said it might be tough, but if we put a man on the moon, we can do it," Dewitt said.

She was watching the spectacle unfold with some friends from San Jose, who'd dropped by to check on the progress.

Homes built from used cargo containers are a growing trend, but the Zayante cabin was a first for nearly everyone involved in its construction: DeWitt and husband Kam Kasravi; designer David Fenster of Modulus Architects; general contractor Adam Dorn of Norcal Construction; and even Santa Cruz County, which has known an offbeat home or two in its day.

Pieced together like Lincoln Logs in a single afternoon, the construction project seemed to belie the time it took to design the cabin — and fit it within the DeWitts' budget and space constraints.

"There have been more consultants on this project than I've done on certain high rises," Fenster said.

‘ONE OF THE STRONGEST THINGS MAN HAS EVER BUILT'

As a young girl in upstate New York, Connie DeWitt had a 1,000-acre wooded wonderland at her disposal. She wanted the same for her 7-year-old son, Kyler, and the family's postage-stamp backyard in downtown San Jose wasn't cutting it. In May 2009, she and her husband purchased 10.8 acres on an adjacent pair of parcels off Zayante Road.

High-tech engineers by trade, DeWitt and Kasravi got the "the Internet bug" and moved together to Silicon Valley in 1997. DeWitt eventually left the startup life for art school, nonprofit work and child-rearing; when she got the idea for the mountain cabin, she knew she'd be working on a budget. She didn't want to compromise on the design, though.

DeWitt wanted a light-filled, minimalist retreat, a world away from the family's San Jose residence, which was built in 1912.

"I wanted a clean aesthetic, not something that would get moldy," DeWitt said. "I didn't want to spend all our time maintaining it."

A prefab home seemed like the obvious choice, maybe a Michelle Kaufmann or a Rocio Romero. Both designers offer a modern aesthetic, with relatively predictable pricing. But trucking a prefab home into the Santa Cruz Mountains posed challenges. Even if a truck could make it up through the steep, winding road through the redwoods, the private bridge off Zayante Road was too narrow to fit a house.

"Some [prefab homes] are flat-pack, like Ikea houses, and the constructor puts it together," DeWitt said. "But (the designs are) not that flexible. And our land is terraced, as the creek has worked its way down over the eons." DeWitt's research eventually pointed her to shipping containers, reused by a growing number of people to build homes and commercial structures. SG Blocks, the New York-based company DeWitt used to purchase and customize the containers, bills them as "earthquake-, hurricane-, fire- and tornado-resistant." In 2006, Sun Microsystems created a modular data center inside a shipping container and rattled it through a magnitude 6.7 earthquake.

"It's almost like you can see the container laughing," said David Fenster, principal architect of Modulus in San Jose, a friend of DeWitt and Kasravi, and designer of the Zayante house. "It's really one of the strongest things man has ever built. They'll stack ‘em 10 high and ship them across the ocean."

Talking with her real estate agent and fellow Felton-area homeowners, DeWitt learned she's not the first to lay steel in the neighborhood. One of the family's parcels runs along the old railroad grade, and there's an underground steel storage container around the corner, rumored to have once kept Disney films safe from disaster.

But perhaps most importantly for DeWitt and Kasravi, shipping containers could be transported to Zayante one at a time, traveling relatively easily over the bridge and assembled on-site into a custom module.

LIGHT AND SHADOW

Cabins in Zayante, many of them built in the 1970s with the wood paneling and shag carpeting to show for it, start around $200,000. DeWitt estimates she will have paid close to $600,000 for her custom home. The couple contacted a homeowner in Richmond, Va., who forewarned them that if they were hoping to save money, they should look elsewhere. The same proved true for saving time.

"It's been a much bigger project than any of us anticipated," DeWitt said.

Even before the myriad of consultants — soil analysts, structural engineers and geologists, to name a few — DeWitt's first roadblock was finding a suitably flat spot on her land. It helped that she wanted a home with a light footprint, no more than 1,200 square feet.

On a camping trip, she found a clearing, roughly 200-by-70 feet, where the trees were already felled and the sunlight streamed in. A large redwood would have to be axed — there needed to be enough room for a fire truck to turn around — but DeWitt and Kasravi had the fallen tree milled in Watsonville and plan to use the wood to build a staircase at the mountain home.

Fenster also camped out with DeWitt and Kasravi at the site to help him get an idea how to design their shipping-container house — a first in his career.

"To take a container, and figure out efficient ways to make it work on a very small site, in a very small area, on a very small footprint — to create something that would be wonderful to be in would be very challenging," Fenster said.

The final design is "all about light and shadow," with five glass doors to the outside, 23 windows, and nine holes for skylights, preinstalled by SG Blocks. DeWitt chose dry-freight containers called Hi Cubes; at 9 feet, 6 inches, they would give her the high ceilings she hoped for.

"Usually containers used for construction are not considered seaworthy anymore," DeWitt said. "In our case, they did not have, at the time, any tall cubes that were not seaworthy, so we ended up buying boxes that are newer."

General contractor Adam Dorn of Norcal Construction, the Santa Cruz firm that built the home's foundation, is now at work on the septic and electrical systems, drywall and insulation, work Dorn expects to complete by August.

DeWitt and Kasravi said they may one day retire in their mountain home. Carrying groceries down the 120-foot trail from their new driveway, across the steel foot bridge to their front door will keep them in shape, DeWitt said.

INTO THE WOODS

Half a dozen of the family's friends traveled from San Jose on Thursday afternoon to see the containers craned in. A few brought their children, who ran through the woods to play on the tree swing with Kyler. Around noon, when the clouds broke and half the hot dogs on the grill were gone, an engine puttered up the mud-slick road. DeWitt ushered her family and friends over to watch the third container — this one for the kitchen and bathroom — craned into place. At 30 feet, it was the largest piece of steel, but just like the others, it was gently laid onto the foundation without incident. Once the container was on the ground, Kyler asked his mom for the camera — but not to take pictures of the house.

"This is me with a banana slug on my hand," Kyler said, laughing and showing his friend photos from earlier in the day. The cabin might not be finished until August, but from the looks of things, DeWitt has already gotten what she wanted.

BY THE NUMBERS

Shipping-container cabin in Felton

San Jose resident Connie DeWitt teamed up with SG Blocks, Modulus Architects and NorCal Construction to create a shipping-container cabin in Felton.

BEDROOMS: 3

BATHS: 1.5, plus an outdoor shower

SKYLIGHTS: 9

LOT SIZE: 10.8 acres

SQUARE FEET: 1,200

COST: Around $600,000

FOOTPRINT: The DeWitts had to cut down two oaks and a redwood; they took a family trip to Watsonville, milled the redwood and made the home's staircase.

FURNITURE PLANS: DeWitt recently found a pair of mid-century school library tables, one of which will serve as the cabin's dining table. Construction costs exhausted her budget, she said, so she plans to get the rest of the furniture primarily from CB2 and Ikea.